“The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal.

Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant.”

This is more evidence that games are to social networks what free email was to portals during the dot com boom. To explain that better, let’s go back to first principles.

The growth of a social network

Most social networks move from early adoption to a mass market before petering out in a damp squib of shoulder shrugging from users. Early social networks such as Friendster and Friends Reunited blazed the trail for social networks, but offered little beyond the voyeuristic delights of seeing what people you didn’t like at school were doing now, and hoping that you were doing better than them.

After the schadenfreude passed, users realised that there was a reason why they didn’t stay in touch with the people they didn’t like, and moved on.

The same issue hit portals during the dot com boom. There were lots of portals competing on undifferentiated search (before Google) and content. Then they hit on a brainwave.

Offer people free email.

I was an equity research analyst helping investors understand the Internet sector back then, and I spent a lot of time explaining to bemused investors why offering a corporate -style service for free to consumers was good business:

Frequency: email is something that you use every day. Portals were spending marketing money persuading people to come back every day, but they would check their email without needing to see an ad

Loyalty: Moving an email account is a chore. You have to tell everyone your new address and maintain both for a while.

Games turned out to be Facebook’s free email. As I’ve argued before, the emergence of games on Facebook provided a reason for some Facebook users to come back every day, possibly several times a day.

And each time they came back, they might update a status, comment on a photo, tag a friend…

Facebook provided the platform and the social graph. But games provided the stickiness for a critical mass of people that stopped Facebook petering into irrelevancy.

So what next?

On the one hand, anyone building a social graph knows now that games are key. If you own a platform, you want to make game-makers a vital part of your ecosystem.

On the other, Facebook has realised that while games are hugely attractive to a portion of their audience, the viral hooks and in-stream notifications are annoying to a much larger group. So they’ve canned the virality of their platform (of course, it helps that companies then have to spend lots of money buying Facebook ads).

So we could either see game developers moving en masse to Google (if it offers clever, cost-effective viral mechanics when it launches its games platform), or the cost of acquiring customers on Facebook declining in the face of the increasing competition.

Either way, the role of games as a critical component of a successful social network has been comprehensively proven.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com

Google is brilliant in terms of investing money, they really take time to study the business and venture in it after gathering all the necessary data. I'm now wondering how will it look like to be playing games in google, they should be able to provide a more interesting games and give us the opportunity to gain some money too.

zoombapup

I wonder if google will push forward native client in this move too. I like social games but always hanker for the more hardcore experiences alongside them. Native client was one way to push the hardcore game into the web-sphere. If google managed to incorporate the hardcore alongside the social game into a single social game site, wouldn't that be a really compelling picture for active gamers?

As a developer, I don't much care who actually delivers the game, so long as users know its mine and I get paid. But I've found that while flash offers the reach and ease-of-use for players, it really stifles the opportunities for exploring more complexity, so having a method of delivering the same web experience but towards the more mainstream gamer audience would be ideal.

About

Gamesbrief is a blog about the business of games. We look behind the headlines to tell you not just what is happening to games, but why it matters to your business. From Activision to Zynga, we analyse the companies who are making waves in the games industry and the new platforms, like Facebook, iPhone and Unity, that are changing the market.

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